James Poulos: Not a big-picture president

June 1, 2014

Updated May 30, 2014 3:30 p.m.

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President Barack Obama enters the stadium at West Point to give the commencement address at the graduation ceremony at the U.S. Military Academy on May 28, in West Point, New York. SPENCER PLATT, GETTY IMAGES

President Barack Obama enters the stadium at West Point to give the commencement address at the graduation ceremony at the U.S. Military Academy on May 28, in West Point, New York. SPENCER PLATT, GETTY IMAGES

Give President Barack Obama credit for one thing: He didn’t plunge the U.S. into unmitigated disaster in the Mideast.

In the wake of his latest and biggest foreign-policy address, however, that’s where the plaudits end. President Obama is a man who seems to have no interest in telling America what he’s got in mind for a grand strategy. It’s not even clear he wants to formulate one.

And from the standpoint of this late date in his second term, it’s likely he never had one to begin with.

To be sure, he’s racked up some modest but important victories. Back when the president inherited eight long years of turmoil from George W. Bush, there was a real, frightening chance that he’d make a catastrophic error in foreign policy judgment. Fortunately, that never happened.

Today, it’s hard for anyone, Right or Left, to be completely satisfied with what looks to be the outcome of America’s toil in Afghanistan and Iraq. But we’re not staring disaster in the face.

Today, we’re not embroiled in an open regional war drawing pitting Iran against Saudi Arabia, and drawing in Turkey and the Gulf States. That might have happened. It would have been a nightmare. And, thanks to President Obama, it didn’t.

Similarly, although the Arab Spring has been a crushing disappointment, somehow the president managed to keep U.S. relations from spiraling completely out of control.

Yes, his Israel policy has been ineffective. Yes, his Syria policy has been embarrassingly reactive and contradictory. Still, when it comes to the Islamic world, Obama faced a daunting test, and he didn’t flunk.

(P.S.: Osama bin Laden really is dead.)

Now that the president is turning the page, however, it’s alarming to see the next chapter appears to be a blank. His recent West Point address, billed as a major statement on the future of U.S. foreign policy, was flat, predictable and cagey. It’s getting bad reviews from important experts.

Worst of all, it’s giving a bad name to the notion of a middle way between interventionism run riot and a pull-up-the-drawbridges approach. Interventionists are convinced Obama is dangerously withdrawn from the world. Obama comes off as passive and uncertain even relative to leaders who accepted the idea that they were stuck with a declining country.

At the same time, Obama has realists, isolationists and other skeptics complaining that he’s still content to spread drones and special forces far and wide, while keeping U.S. troops stationed across the world.

This wide spectrum of complaints is rooted in fact, but it orbits around the central problem with the president’s foreign policy. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you can at least cultivate some certainty among them about your sense of the big picture. This is where Obama has failed.

True, it can be dangerous to tip your cards on something as important and decisive as your grand strategy. However, that’s not always the case: Giving away the game was much of the genius of Ronald Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War (“We win, they lose”). At any rate, presidents are well-served by giving friends, foes and critics alike a basic sense of how they want to operationalize their view of America’s position in the world.

Why hasn’t Obama done this? Perhaps his views have simply changed. Like many presidents, his second term has curbed the expansive, soaring vision of his early years. Obama’s promise of healing and hope faded before challenges he and others did not foresee – much as President Bush’s promise of an end to tyranny collapsed amid a second term full of cautious repositioning.

Nevertheless, the West Point address was a perfect opportunity to take a deep breath, step back and advance a fresh, new take. Obama could have thought of it as his own personal reset button. It’s not as if he didn’t have the material. How do we think about Russia now? What happened to the vaunted “pivot to Asia” that his administration recently announced? What’s America’s approach to Latin America?

And what about Europe, where the economy still struggles and a big wave of anti-EU sentiment is changing politics in a dramatic way?

Alas, Obama offered none of these crucial components of a coherent grand strategy. About Russia, he gave us a single line about the Ukrainian drama at Europe’s periphery. About Asia, he made no mention of his apparently scuttled pivot. About Latin America, he noted that Brazil’s rising middle class is going to compete with our own.

And about Europe, where reactionary and revolutionary politics still threaten to rock the continent at a time of great weakness, Obama had nothing to say at all – as if those liberal democracies were post-historical “safe zones” that nobody needs to worry about.

These are not incidental defects in an otherwise acceptable foreign policy. They are profound lapses that will continue to haunt America long after Obama’s successor has taken over the White House.

It was a mistake to let the “war on terror” distract us from a broader and fuller foreign policy. Now, Obama is guilty of letting his effort to get past the terror war do the same thing.

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